Profile

She/her. Originally from Austin, Texas, I received an English degree from the University of Texas, became interested in healthcare data and epidemiology, and moved to the Bay Area for a Master’s of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. I learned cost-effectiveness modeling after grad school. That and wanting to be nearer to my sister led to me move to Kansas City to work in the Cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel system) Research department of a hospital.

I have traveled some: I was on a 6-week archeological dig in Israel in the summer of 1997 (and I could still eat hummus at every meal), and spent the summer of 2000 working in London and traveling around the British Isles, plus a jaunt through Spain and into Portugal. More recently, my family was almost trapped on the island of Martinique, a French Department in the Carribbean, at the beginning of the pandemic-related international travel lockdown in March.

Random facts about me: I love books (y/a, nonfiction, adult fiction) and read widely in physical, digital, and audio formats. I have knitted for many years. I like scary movies. I have coeliac disease, which it turns out you can trigger/develop later in life. For a brief time, I make and sold chocolate confections and even got an online chocolatier certification!

Clinical trials involve a lot of different work: research nurses and doctors who enroll and treat patients, data collectors who fill out forms from the trial related to the patients’ treatment, health events before and after the treatment, and other characteristics; statisticians, programmers, and analysts who look for patterns in the data; and many more.

My role in this complex process is to be in charge of people who collect data from hospitals related to how much it costs to treat clinical trial subjects. I help make special forms so that the subjects know exactly what is being collected, and they can sign it or not. If they do, then my team can use their signed form to collect hospital bills. Then I help the team look at the bills and come up with an average cost for each treatment. 

If I’m lucky, I also get to build a model! I use computer programs to help me. I ask myself, What important things could happen that might be different between the treatments? Maybe one group is taking a medicine that makes them more likely to have a heart attack, for instance. Maybe one treatment makes people feel better, even if it doesn’t help them live longer. I look for data, and sometimes make educated guesses, about all these puzzle pieces. It’s like a logic puzzle! It is very satisfying work. When it’s as good as I can get it, I run the model to see what kinds of outcomes are likely to happen, and how much the cost and outcomes change based on the model variables (the things I put into the model). Then I help write a report or even an article to publish about what we found.

This is all in the United States. The way healthcare is paid for here is different from the UK — but the UK has a special government department that pays for new devices and drugs. They requires this kind of analysis, and even conduct make their own model to make sure that they agree with what the drug-maker says. 

My daily work involves checking in on studies at different points in the process, working on models or developing forms, or cleaning data. It’s fun for me to get to learn about new treatments, and about heart and blood vessel diseases and disorders. I am not a doctor, so it’s always an education. And I never want to stop learning!